`The Unique Structure of the Present Great Andamanese: An Overview of the Grammar
Abstract Great Andamanese is an isolate and belongs to the sixth language family of India (Abbi 2009). Present-day Great Andamanese (PGA), a koinèized version of the North Great Andamanese languages is a head-marking polysynthetic and agglutinative language with an SOV pattern, and has a very elaborate system for marking inalienability (Abbi 2006, 2010) nested in seven possessive markers designating different body-divisions. These markers are further grammaticalized in the language and appear as proclitics which classify a large number of lexical items as dependent categories. The author proposes that the Great Andamanese conceptualize their world through these interdependencies and hence the grammar of the language encodes this important phenomenon in every grammatical category expressing referential, attributive and predicative meaning. These are very unusual features never reported earlier in grammars of languages of the world and thus, indicate very old structures in the chain of language evolution.
1. Introduction
The Andaman Islands are comprised of a cluster of approximately 550 islands, rocks and rocky outcrop running from north to south and located southeast of the Indian sub- continent in the Bay of Bengal. They are separated from the Malay Peninsula by the
Andaman Sea , an extension of the Bay of Bengal, and are part of the Union Territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands belonging to India (Map 1). Geographically, the
Andaman Islands are closer to Myanmar and Indonesia than to mainland India. However, contact between the Andamanese and the populations of the neighboring countries has not been established till date. The capital city of the Andaman Islands is Port Blair,
1 situated in the south of the Islands at a distance of 1255 km from Kolkata and 1190 km from Chennai.
There are ten languages in the Great Andamanese family, which can be grouped into three varieties: southern, central and northern. These are: Aka-Bea, Aka-Bale, the
2 southern variety; Aka-Pucikwar [known as Pujjukar in the current spoken language], Aka-Kol, Aka-Kede, Aka-Jowoi, as the central variety; and Aka-Jeru, Aka-Bo, Aka-Kora [known as Khora by the present speakers] and Aka-Cari [known as Sare by the present speakers] a northern variety. Except for Jeru and Sare 1 all Great Andamanese languages are now extinct. Not all languages were mutually intelligible with each other as the languages of the Great Andamanese tribes formed a ‘‘linguistic continuum”, so that each language was closely related to its neighbor on each side but those at the extreme ends of the geographic continuum were mutually unintelligible. Hence, Aka-Cari (Map 2), a North Great Andamanese language, was mutually unintelligible with Aka Bea, the southern variety. The present-day Great Andamanese 2 language is a mixture of four northern varieties 3 with sporadic interferences from the central variety such as Aka Pucikwar. Linguists consider Great Andamanese as a language isolate because no links to any other language family have been established so far.
1 There is one speaker who hails from the background of Sare, however speaks the present form of the Great Andamanese language .
2 I will use the term Present-day Great Andamanese (PGA) for the present form of the language and avoid referring to it by any of the four languages from which it draws its resources so as not to empower one language over the other. It is spoken in the Strait Island and some parts of Port Blair.
3 The last few generations of Great Andamanese speakers are descendents of intermarriages among North Andamanese tribes. The Government of India encouraged this practice in order to preserve their dwindling numbers when the entire population was settled on ‘Strait Island’.
3
Map 2 Courtesy: www.andaman.org
Though the PGA is characterized by a mixture of the linguistic features of four to five varieties of Great Andamanese languages, what we notice in today’s Great Andamanese speech is a kind of levelling of different linguistic systems. Perhaps several grammatical inputs have contributed to generate the present language. The linguistic system of present Great Andamanese appears to be close to koine ization (Manoharan
4 1989). As the language is critically endangered, with just eight terminal speakers 4, it is very difficult to say how far it is mixed and what elements are mixed. However, the belief of Siegel (1985:363) that koine ization results in the reduction and simplification of grammar is attested to by some areas in the grammar of Great Andamanese; though the verb morphology and the possession constructions are rather complex and elaborate.
The research reported here is based on the first-hand field data elicited during the period of 2001-2002 and 2005-2009. Several visits were made to the Strait Island and
Port Blair where the speakers of the language reside 5.
The latest research by Abbi in 2003 and 2006 show that Great Andamanese constitutes the sixth language family of India. Linguisti c researc h on th e survivin g language s of th e Andama n Islands reveal s littl e commonalit y betwee n Grea t Andamanes e and the languages of the Jaraw a-Ong e group. (Abb i, 2003 , 2006 , 2009). The Jarawa-
Onge group has been associated with Austronesian language family (Blevins 2007). Out of the ten varieties that once existed in the Great Andamanese family, we found traces of only four languages, i.e. Sare, Khora, Bo and Jero in today’s speech. The recent deaths of
4 This was the number of fluent speakers when we began our research in the island. There are only five speakers left now. Fortunately, we could interview some of the fluent speakers of the language when they were still alive. Special mention must be made of Jirake, the chief of the Great Andamanese tribe and Nao Jr. his younger brother, and Boa Sr who came from the Bo tribe. More than 50% of the current population of the Great Andamanese tribe consists of children below 14 years of age (See Abbi et al 2007) 5 The research was conducted in two phases. The first one was a pilot survey of the languages of the Andaman Islands supported and funded by the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany. The second phase–research was conducted at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi under the project Vanishing Voices of the Great Andamanese (VOGA) supported by the Hans Rausing Endangered Language Fund, SOAS, University of London.
5 the last speakers of Khora and Bo have left only Jero and Sare speakers who are not fully conversant with their respective languages but remember isolated words from their native tongues. The demographic scale of these islanders is inversely related to their degree of contact with mainlanders: the longer the contact, the smaller the population.
2 The sound system
We discuss in short the sound system of the PGA language in the following pages. Because of the fact that PGA is a moribund language with a few speakers left in the community and the fact that our speakers hail from diverse background, care has been taken to observe and report phonetic variation across speakers. This information will, perhaps, give an idea of phonemic grid of the extinct and dying languages of the Great Andamanese family.
2.1 Vowels PGA has a seven ‐vowel system, as shown in Table 1, and offers a large possibility of combinations in the area of vowel sequences or clusters, as represented in Table 2. We noted a high variation in the inventory of vowels and consonants among the speakers because of ‘koiné’ and the ‘mixed’ nature of the language. Another factor leading to such variation could be the fact that the language is on the verge of extinction and community members do not remember many words and their exact pronunciation, and hence, offer varied sounds for the same word. The indifference of the speakers towards the language could also lead to such variation. Despite such variation, phonemic inventories of vowels and consonants could be arrived at by eliciting minimal pairs for most of the sounds. Where minimal pairs were not available, the judgements of the native speakers about the phonological contrasts were taken into account.
6 Front Central Back Close i u Half close e o Half open Open
Table 1 Vowels of Great Andamanese
In the first phase of fieldwork (2001–2002), we recorded the mean mid central vowel [ ] in the data. However, subsequent visits to the speech community and the digital recording of the vowel indicated that the language lacks this central vowel. There is only one unrounded back vowel and that is a. The rendering of Hindi words such as b nao ‘make’, was also realized as banao . There are more archiphonemes in this language than any other language that I have come across. Hence, contrast is neutralized across speakers. For example, we noticed that though e and ε stand in contrast, speakers use them interchangeably in some words. Similar was the situation with back vowels o and , as well as with o and u, which were in free variation, at times within the speech of the same speaker, despite the fact that the two sounds do offer contrast in minimal pairs. We have tried to capture this variation wherever possible in the dictionary, with the source specified.
We could not attest length at the phonemic level. We have specified length where we thought it was important for the pronunciation of the word, especially in the combination of two vowels (see Table 2). Phonetically it has been specified by a colon mark [:] placed after the long vowel.
2.2 Vowel sequences/clusters
The language is rich in vowel sequences or vowel clusters. We could attest such clusters, involving both short and long varieties of vowels. Also, some speakers use an epenthetic semivowel between short vowels within a word. For example, some speakers use the palatal semivowel y as in ia > iya , or the rounded back semivowel w as in ua > uwa
7 perhaps because of the influence of Hindi. However, only a few speakers use such epenthetic insertions and they too do not use them consistently. One of our contact persons, Peje never used a semivowel between two vowels.
Front Back ia, iu, io , i:o, ie, ua, uo, u i:e, ei, eo, e , oa, o:a, o:ѐ, ou, oi, oe, o:e, oε εo, εo ѐi, :e, e ao, a:o, a:u, au, a ε, a:e, ae, ai
Table 2 Vowel clusters of Great Andamanese
Only one example of a three-vowel cluster εk εie ‘pick up in lap’ was noticed. As mentioned earlier, the phonemic status of the length of vowels is doubtful, as it varies from speaker to speaker; oco ‘net’ while o:c ‘net’. The long and short u varies freely before a final vowel in a situation of vowel cluster. Thus, there are variations among speakers in the renderings for ‘my ear’ r-bu:o and r-buo . We have tried our best to document all the variations so that the reader gets an idea of the variety of sounds available in present Great Andamanese. For details refer to A Dictionary of the Great Andamanese language by Anvita Abbi (in press).
2.3 Consonants
As far as consonants are concerned, we attested unique inventories of sounds, such as the evidence of bilabial fricatives, both voiced and voiceless β, φ, and labialized lateral lw (at least in one speaker, Peje). PGA does not attest the voiced velar sound g and the voiceless glottal fricative h. The former sound was available in languages such as Bo and Pujjukar, which are extinct now, and in the languages of south and middle Andaman. We could attest this sound in the speech and songs of Boa Sr., the only Bo speaker that we had. This and the fact that the name of one of our consultants was Golat means that the sound must have existed in one of the Great Andamanese languages spoken in the past.
8 Conversely, we noticed the acquisition of h from Hindi in the speech of some young speakers. The following sound sets are in free variation at the intra ‐community level, i.e. within the same clan.
[φ ~p ~ f]
w [ ~ l ~ w~ l ] [k ~ x] [s ~ ~ c ~ c ] [r ~ ] [t ~ ]
Table 3 Phonetic variations across speakers
The sounds in free variation vary from speaker to speaker, thus confirming the hypothesis that the existing speakers of the language are not descendants of the speakers of one language but of speakers of different varieties of the same language family. In other words, PGA represents inter ‐group free variation. However, the substitution of sounds in free variation did not disturb the comprehension of the word in question. The intra ‐community variation renders a large number of sound inventories, as shown in Table 4. The non-phonemic sounds that occur with low frequency are given in brackets in the table. Our consultant, Peje, for example, does not have the lateral l in his verbal w repertoire as he invariably uses l in all positions where other members use l. This could be an idiosyncratic feature of Peje or could be relics of the extinct languages of the family.
Labio- Bilabial Dental Alveolar Retroflex Palatal Velar Dental p b t d c j k Plosive p t k
m n Nasal
(ײ) Trill r
9 ( ) ( β) (f) s (x) Fricative
Lateral (l w) l Approximant (w) y Table 4 Consonants of Great Andamanese
Considering the speech of the elderly persons in the community one cannot fail to observe that due to contact with Hindi, speakers are losing the voiceless bilabial fricative
φ to voiceless bilabial aspirated obstruent p and voiced counterpart β to voiced bilabial obstruent b. One can safely say that the bilabial fricatives are on their way to extinction. Similarly, in the last 40 years, the voiceless velar fricative x has changed to the voiceless velar aspirated k . Only one speaker, a 76-year-old woman called Boro, who was
.and this has also been documented ,ײ originally a Khora speaker, used the retroflex trill
Boro died in November 2009. One of our main consultants, Lico, who calls herself a Sare speaker but whose language has traces of Pujjukar language because of her upbringing, used s wherever other speakers used . Our oldest speaker, Boa Sr., who was a Bo speaker, used c and c instead of the sibilant . We wish there were more speakers and the language was vibrant enough to give us a fairly represented speech profile. However, one can give the following pattern of variation for these sounds, tracing them back to their sources. The names of the source languages are given in parentheses. c/c (Bo) ~ s (Sare) ~ (Jero)
At times, there is inter-changeability of sounds within the speech of the same speaker. For instance, our main consultant, Nao Jr, often substituted the dental [t] for the retroflex [ ] and vice versa, as in the word ara ile mo ‘bladder’ for ara iletmo . All these variations exist despite the fact that the pair of sounds under consideration stand in contrast. Such variation in the speech of the same speaker can only be ascribed to the status of the language, which is dying rapidly, and is not used by speakers in their daily life. The disuse of the language seems to be the most significant reason for the variation in sounds, lexicon, as well as syntactic constructions.
10 3. Syllable structure
Syllables have the following structure:
(C) (V) (C) (C) V (C) (V)
Only the vowel (V) is obligatory in Great Andamanese. Furthermore, syllables can involve consonants (C) in the onset (i.e. beginning) or the coda (i.e. end) of the syllable. Vowel sequences or vowel clusters are very common and involve two syllabic peaks within a word. Consonant clusters are rare in the language. They occur either word initially or in-between a word between two vowels. They also occur across word boundary in compound words. No word ever ends in a consonant cluster. Most simple syllable structure, i.e. constituting of one obligatory vowel is seen in words denoting genitive affixes or clitics. As a consequence, the following syllable structures are possible in simple words: Forms Examples Meaning V -a ‘genitive affix’ VV ie ‘catch’, ‘give’ CV o ‘stay, ‘live’ CVV boi ‘ask’ CVVC uoc ‘hear’ CVC b r ‘breeze’, ‘air’ VCV uno ‘sit down’ VVCV eole ‘see’ CVCV cone ‘go’ CVCVC ema ‘run’ CCVCV tr p o ‘climb (tree)’ [rare] CVCCV jermo ‘worm’ Table 5 Possible syllable structures
As affixation and compounding are very productive word-formation devices in the language, a complex word can be as long as of five syllables: aka ker tot l co ‘uvula’ VCV -CVC -CVC -CVCVC 1- 2 3 4 5
11 bilik u tut o 'cobweb' CVCVCV -CVC -CV 1 2 3 4 5
Names of birds, insects, reptiles and other jungle creatures provide most of the complex words of long syllable structures constituting, at times, two consonant clusters within the same word, as in tr k imo ‘long-tail cricket’ or kul e mo ‘wasp ( Vespa affinis)’.
4. Typology of the language and word formation processes Present Great Andamanese is a head-marking polysynthetic and agglutinative language with two types of nouns: dependent and non-dependent. Most of the nouns that refer to the typical inalienably possessed items as well as those which refer to the objects or results of an action are marked for dependency. All body-part terms, kinship terms, part- to-whole, part-to-component, as well as nouns referring to time, direction, and depth are dependent nouns. The dependent nouns are further divided into seven classes, each defined by a distinct body part inalienability marker appearing as a proclitic. There are three numbers encoded in pronominal forms. However, nouns in general are not marked for duality and plurality. Number is marked for plurality on a few common nouns designating animacy features, e.g. ‘dogs’, ‘children’ etc.
A large number of morphemes, affixes, phonological words, clitics and incorporation can constitute a single phonological word . This word generally is a verb phrase. Great Andamanese is a prototypical “head marking” language where the verb complex includes a large amount of information in multi-morphemic strings that include subject and object pronominal prefixes or clitics, incorporated nominals in causative constructions, reflexive and reciprocal prefixes, as well as suffixes expressing tense, aspect and mood. Overt external NPs are present in addition to the verb complex .
12 However these are optional and often dropped in discourse. PGA is a verb final language. However, while the genitive phrase precedes the head noun (as is typical of verb-final languages), other modifiers follow the modified. The language is of the
S(ubject)-O(bject)-V(erb) type. Some unexpected features, such as the fact that morphological causative markers are always prefixed rather than suffixed to the verb raise questions about the typology of the original structure of the language and changes in the language during the course of its history.
PGA offers basically two different sets of subject markers, one for prototypical agent nominals -e suffixed to agent nouns and another, -bi , which is attached to the subjects of unergative intransitive verbs, the subjects of unaccusative verbs, and object nominals. It was observed that in discourse and in fast speech speakers tend to drop these markings. We symbolize this relationship of noun with the corresponding verbs as:
So = Sa = O = -bi or unmarked.
A = -e or unmarked.
Present Great Andamanese is thus, an incompletely ergative-absolutive language with a fluid S-marking.
4.1 Word Formation processes
Attributive adjectives and transitive verbs are generally preceded by a proclitic. Thus, we have kata ‘piece’ and ot ‐kata ‘dwarf’; and ot-lѐk o ‘nude ’ and ot-lѐk o-ke ‘to bare all’. These clitics are very important as any change in the clitic changes the meaning of the verb in question. For instance, εr-p k-e ‘take out from fire or any hot medium’ (imperative)
εt-p ok-e ‘kill’ (imperative) Sometimes a new word is derived by adding negative marker or an adjective to an existing word. Thus, we have
13 εr‐ulu ‐phu o ‐kara ‐cae CLT ‐eye ‐NEG CLT ‐nails ‐rotten blind maimed
Similarly, verbs can be derived from nouns by adding verbal elements, such as object clitic (in case of a transitive verb), mood, and tense markers.